


Dying a Legend, Darling

by clytemnestras



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Raven-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 03:20:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5523503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I want to be the girl with all the cake</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dying a Legend, Darling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [upupa_epops](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=upupa_epops).



Girls aren’t only supposed to exist in parenthesis. There’s something about her taking a breath and she isn’t here, grounded and bruised; eyes closed, she becomes Godlike, looking down at everything from between the nearest stars. Then waking, and being dirt-rough, and somehow less-real.

Raven becomes aware that some days she wasn’t supposed to be real. Reality is too fragile to allow her much.

*

Earth _hurts_. Her bones don’t set right even in the splints and things fuse together in the wrong way. Her nerves are all twisted up, tangled fairylights, and resting her weight too long on the damage feels like flint grating the pink mangle of tissue. It’s a slowness that keeps her down, keeps her attached to the earth but it feels like something. Being God, sometimes, isn’t enough. The disparity of being something precious and being something real is lined with that pain, her legs buckling on the long walks under the stars, slipping on the rungs when she climbs the highest ropes and ladders to be closer to the night air.

Late at night, tucked up in a wide threadbare bunk, Raven will stretch herself out - toes pointed to the ground - and press her finger into her scar-tissue like counting off rosary beads. She feels it all. Her body all shredded, she is in pain, and is glorious.

*

This is what it’s like in dreams: strung up from the sky but tethered hard into the ground. The wood behind her back ruining the line of her shoulders, the blood that runs hot and slow down every part of her.

Sometimes it’s as though she’s stretched on the grass with her shoulderblades crying out, feeling every moment of her feathers falling out.

Sometimes there’s the sun, and the sun is a girl and she can feel light touch her skin, not quite burning. She’s turned towards the light, feeling heavy and warm and she wakes up a long time before wholeness seeps in.

*

They play cards. It’s the long kind of dark night, like it should be in winter except there’s no cold. His breath is still hot on her face, invisible but there, all the same. They gather into her bunk on these nights, slipping away from the everyday; her hanging up her hurt and exoskeleton, him his weapons and aches. They’re nothing in these moments but disassembled and soft. He’s leaning close enough in that he can probably see her hand. They aren’t unalike. He’ll cheat her here, serious and knowing that they’re too even for it to be fair. She’ll cheat him in other ways.

Bellamy spreads out in her space like something uncontainable, out of his armor and into any crevice that she’ll offer to him, raw and mortal.

She likes how he looks in this light, too close to her, sweat slick on his temple where his pulse is pounding, shifting the slickness with every beat. He takes the hand and she lets him. Leaning forward, taking back her own breathing room, she guides him back into her pillows and settles her weight down on his lap.

She kisses him hard, harder, wanting to leave a marks on him, saying I’m am bruised, I have bruised, too. She grinds down, fingers rough through clothes, under clothes. She covers him in her, holds his hands over his head and rocks in his lap. Pushes down hard and rides him into submission. He breathes something into her chest, something like love or prayer, and it’s everything not to hold him there in that glass moment.

Say she doesn’t love him, but he’s a fragile beautiful, and he’s _here_.

Sometimes that’s all things need to be. Him decorated in her thumbprints, her in his golden sweat. Close, too close. She bites all of his noises away.

*

Sometimes she falls asleep in tall places. Trees like cradles, valleys like temper-traps. This is why we climb mountains, she thinks, we miss the sky.

It’s worth the hurt. The hurt is another possession. No one has her pain but her, a sharp thing that she presses tightly into her ribcage until it fills her all the way up.

One night around the fire and everyone left without her noticing, her ankle swells up thickly. Clarke looks her in the eyes without saying anything, no apology for the faithless, and helps her up. They walk back to her room soundlessly, holding her weight up, bodies close.

No _thank you_ s, or _sorry_ s. Nothing but the physicality. There’s nothing she’d want to say.

*

He goes down on her outside, spread out together in the grass and dirt, close enough to see the camp glow and flicker across their faces. His mouth leaves nothing permanent, silver-wet trails across the skin of her thighs gone with every tempered breeze. He holds her hips too tight and she lets him, staring up and the stars and thinking _watch me, watch me, watch me._

Her legs close too hard around her head and she keeps him there, her hands on his shoulders to leave the imprints of her fingers spanning like wings and his mouth like relief against the heat of her.

She falls apart under him, liquid against his mouth with stars in front and behind her eyelids.

When she lets him up his eyes are reverent; no one truly turns away from worship.

*

They all come to her first. The world breaks, the sky falls, they bring her the shattered pieces and tell her; _magician, fix the universe for us._

They expect things without payment. If you can you must.

Sometimes she wants to break things in the midst of war (always a war somewhere - hers, his, the mountain’s, the dirt’s), keep the parts for herself. She doesn’t, but she could, and that’s a power of its own.

What they don’t know is, she’s not the magician.

Not a lover. Queens don’t need her fragility.

Unwillingly, she’s something holy. Not immortal, but hungry like one. Wanting, please God, love me, take me, praise me.

 

Still, she doesn’t break their toys. Or their hearts. Probably.

*

This is what it’s like in dreams; her body is pulled taut, between two extremes and splintering at the core. Everything shattering under her skin, pulling towards the sun and the moon in equal motions. Under it all, as she shakes and becomes equanimous, everything is golden.

Then, in waking, trapped under a body but not trapped inside one, Raven breathes in, and that’s all there is.

**Author's Note:**

> come chat with me on tumblr [@bohemicns](https://) if you feel so inclined


End file.
